I have Photo Shop 7 and Paintshop Pro 9 installed. When I look at a photo in Photo Shop 7 it looks good . When I look at the same photo In PaintShop Pro it doesn't look like the same photo. It is darker and the colors are on the dull side. When I look at another photo but In PSP 9 first it is as I say dark and dull colors. (Of course I can correct it but this is an example of my problem) When I open the same photo in Photo Shop It looks ok.

Photoshop uses the profiles that are embedded in image files when displaying them. PSP ignores such profiles when displaying images. So Photoshop displays the images more precisely.

You can activate a color management option in PSP's Preferences, but you have to know what profile the image uses. And you have to manually switch the profiles each time. But even that somehow never worked for me.

So I guess if you want to edit such an image with a special profile accurately in PSP, you have to open it at first in Photoshop, convert it to sRGB and copy& paste it to PSP or save it and reopen it in PSP.

Lawrym wrote:By "embedded profiles" do you mean the EXIF data. This contains such things as exposure settings, dates, camera model, firmware version etc.

No. I mean an ICC profile that is embedded into the file. EXIF data is just another thing that can be embedded into a image file.

You can think of a profile as the settings for a filter that is applied before an image is displayed. In Photoshop you can permanently apply these "filter settings" by altering the pixel values. That way the image can also be displayed correctly in other applications that don't support profiles.

Profiles are needed to make sure that an image is outputed correctly on different monitors, printers and other devices. The image has its own profile (from the camera or scanner) and each output device has its profile, too. So before an image is displayed or printed it is converted by taking the source and target profiles into account. However, the conversion is only temporary because the actual pixel values stay the same.